Interesting stuff elsewhere…
- A brief institutional history of the Academy and the Lyceum — Edmund Stewart on these ancient quasi-universities and what can be learned from them
- “If you care about free speech, the Department of Education’s anti-D.E.I. effort is a cure far worse than the disease” — Sonja Starr on the administration’s February 14th “Dear Colleague” letter
- “Should we consider everything to be intelligent now… [or is there] something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself?” — on intelligence in humans, plants, fungi, and groups
- The first black graduate of Harvard and the first black professor at a majority-white U.S. university was a philosopher — Kevin J. Harrelson tells us about Richard T. Greener
- “A dynamic, engaging character study that addresses a range of complex ideas… A technical, narrative and philosophical achievement” — “Leibniz – Chronicle of a Lost Painting,” a new movie, is getting good reviews
- “The creative design possibilities are immense and must be explored in artistic practice” — Daniel Story has an optimistic take on people and the chatbots of their deceased loved ones
- Evidence gathering, the zetetic turn in epistemology, and your ex’s Instagram — Carolina Flores & Elise Woodard on the distinctly epistemic norms of inquiry
Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thank you.
Previous Edition
So claims Sonja B. Starr about Trump’s Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague” letter about DEI programs. I think she’s right.
But hers is also an apt description of Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter which, without notice-and-comment and in overreaction to a media-manufactured moral emergency, dismantled due process and effectively established federal regulation of normal sexual conduct.
The difference is that, then, the universities welcomed the authoritarianism-with-a-shoddy-legal-basis, presumably because it was for the “correct” cause.
Now, though, the universities are shocked — shocked — when a different administration joins the authoritarian overreaction game.
Levitsky and Way might very well be right about our (d)evolution into “competitive authoritarianism.”